Radio at 'The Hut'
For fourteen long summers of my childhood and early teens I enjoyed a life without television. I also coped without electric lighting or running water. Those were the days of seven-week Scottish school holidays when, as a family, we'd pack up from our first floor tenement flat in Easterhouse and relocate eighty miles north to a four-room wooden hut just off the country road between Monifieth and Carnoustie. It was one of 40 or so similar huts and my Dad had bought it in the mid-fifties when he'd been working as a welder around Dundee and needed somewhere to sleep. It had cost him about a hundred pounds.
We called it The Hut. It became our holiday home -like but 'n' ben. That's an apt description given I had six older brothers and and one sister. We'd sleep two or three to a bed in the early days, but, as my oldest brothers found jobs and girlfriends in Glasgow, The Hut became less claustrophobic.
I remember our time there as one of freedom and exploration. A path led through bushes, across , over a railway line and into Barry Buddon Army Camp. You were allowed though the camp unless a red flag warned you that target practise was scheduled. Otherwise you could make your way to a vast, deserted sandy beach. To us, it was a marvellous playground at the mouth of the Tay. On rainy days there would be car or bus trips to Carnoustie, Arbroath, Broughty Ferry or Dundee and I still retain a fondness for all those places despite the mocking prejudice of many of my fellow Glaswegians.
The Hut was also where I first discovered the power of radio. At nights, enjoying banquets of fish suppers, we would listen to a small battery-operated wireless. The weather forecast became very important because it would dictate our plans for the next day. There was also music. The Â鶹Éç offered Scottish dance bands. was the place for pop.
The radio also became the source of one of my Mother's most repeated anecdotes. Her name was Mary and one afternoon she shooed us all out of The Hut so she could take a bath. This involved buckets of water filled from a stand-pipe being boiled on our Calor gas stove and poured into a tin bath in front of the coal fire. She drew the curtains but it was too early in the day to light the gas lamp. In this gloomy atmosphere she lowered herself into the bath.
"Mary," said a sinister male voice, "Mary. There's a man in the cupboard."
Terrified, she grabbed a towel and fled from The Hut. Only to discover the voice had come from the radio, which had been burbling away in the background and had been relaying a mystery play. Somehow, she was never as keen on the radio after that.
As for The Hut, it was demolished ten years ago when the site owner decided there was more money in storing caravans for the winter. Yet, at least once a year, I bundle my own children into the car and show them the sights of Carnoustie and Monifieth. Here's the shop where I blew my pocket money on buckets and spades.There's the cafe where we slurped ice drinks. Look, look, you can still buy that novelty rock shaped like false teeth.
They express polite enthusiasm, but I know it doesn't compare to Disneyland.
No, it's much more magical.
